Karsh-Masson Gallery

Parallel Tasking (front) 2000. Photo Jeff Thomas

"Last December, I was reading Ronald Cross' obituary in The Globe and Mail," recalls Sandra Dyck, co-curator and originator of the idea behind the exhibition. Popularly known as "Lasagne," Cross, a Mohawk warrior, fought his way into national headlines during the Oka crisis in Quebec.

The obituary detailed Cross' days as a steelworker in New York City, one of the Mohawk who built the metal skeletons of Manhattan's skyline.

"I didn't know about this," says Dyck, adding that it reminded her of the whole idea of travel and rural to urban transitions. That in completing the buildings, other people built over the metal structures struck her as a metaphor for the aboriginal presence in Ottawa.

"That same day I looked at a series by Ryan Rice, called First We Take Manhattan... a series of paintings on paper of the Mohawk clan symbols - the bear, wolf and turtle - done in cartoon style, kind of like Keith Haring... cavorting around the skyscrapers. He was commenting on this whole tradition."

"It was a confluence of coincidences," she adds.

Dyck realized that despite fairly high profile "one-man" shows, a group show of local aboriginal artists had never been mounted. Urban Myths is the result of her collaboration with local aboriginal curator and photographer, Jeff Thomas.

"Several of the women (artists) we looked at are working for the government," notes Thomas, "And unfortunately didn't have time to do new work for the show."

Aside from this unforeseen difficulty, the curators essentially knew the same artists.

"The interest for me was to co-curate with a non-native person," he says.

"From my perspective," says Dyck, "It was very interesting to see how Jeff connected with the artists in terms of its difference from how I would. He would bring up things that I wouldn't really think of."

For Thomas, the concerns were quite specific.

"How do you maintain a sense of who you are as an Indian?" he says. "I was looking to take it a step further - how do we accommodate our sense of self in the urban landscape? As artists, what is our responsibility? Is it just gonna be exhibition after exhibition - and the same crowd comes?"

"How do you raise the level of discussion about urban aboriginal people? There are a few artists take that into consideration, but there's that tribal connection that continues to permeate the work. For me, I wanted to provoke people."

The result is a multi-dimensional mixed media feast for the mind and eye exploring the myriad concerns and directions of some locally based aboriginal artists. In addition to painting, photography, and mixed media, the show boasts some massive installations. Collectively, "dramatic" describes this exhibition well, a rare achievement in any exhibition, particularly a group one.

Sylvie Paré's La Fête des Morts (1998) consists of a long black velour dress, attached to a wall. With its arm-less mannequin, and intricately beaded embroidered leatherwork adornments, the dress is a perfect foil for the mass of metal objects - pots, pans, knives, scissors, surgical instruments, keys, safety pins - rooted to its unfurled train. The telegraph pole in Claude Latour's I Finally Got My Tree Back (2000) emerges from a small pile of earth, almost touching the ceiling. Along with its painted hooks and rusting old staples, the bear skull near the top unlocks another level to Latour's statement on displacement. Finally Greg Hill's Two rowing in a no passing zone (2000), features a canoe made of trees from his own yards and cereal boxes. The Raison Bran, Eggo, and Shreddie box wrapped craft sits diagonally over a double yellow line painted on the floor. "You think it's ironic, but it's what I know," says Hill in his sharp quick-witted accompanying text.

A search for continuity in life and a quest to somehow represent it seem to preoccupy many of these artists. Aside from subject matter, this theme bears itself out in innovative use of media as well.

Dyck suggests that it's a prevailing stereotype that aboriginal art must include feathers, beads, and leatherwork. Aboriginal artists work with the same media as non-aboriginal artists. And yet, in Urban Myths some artists opt to include these very media in forging links with the past.

In Parallel Tasking (2000) Barry Ace uses a dress form torso to display a spectacular waistcoat. Plastered with tiny beads, hand-embroidered, to make up flowers on a cream background, the wire mesh back forms a see-through pane, allowing viewers to see an image of electronic circuitry. On top of this, Ace continues the flower embroidery using electronic components and wires. Long feathers and wire sweep out of the head.

"It's about pushing people beyond the boundaries, about what they believe makes up native Indians," says Thomas. "Do we leave it to ethnographers? To the archeologists?"